6 Responses

are you directly comparing this to events in the arab spring? seems like apples and oranges in terms of scale and contexts.
tea party came out of major party/bigmoney/faux-news roots and so had more juice and access from the start.

No, just asking anyone who cares to compare them to do that. I agree it’s apples and oranges, or maybe pomegranates and blueberries… There’s a whole array of factors that turns some events into ‘news’ and others into silent non-events. Identifying some of these, as you’ve begun to do, is a useful exercise.

gotcha, I would welcome any suggestions about how to turn such furor into movements with some lasting political clout, so hard in our two party system to get any real alternative perspectives on the public radar let alone at the table where decisions that matter are made. Obama has been giving some lovely re-election speeches recently but he is solidly in the capitalist/technocrat camp, where is the communist horizon?http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/05/jodi-dean-the-communist-horizon/

There was an article I read at Common Dreams on 9/14, buI can’t find it in their archives (it wasn’t listed as a regular Opinion piece), but the author started with how it was basically Tom Brokaw who declared war on Iraq, and went on to explain how the mainstream media was constantly attacked by the Swift-Boaters whenever they ran any stories unfavorable to the US wars against Iraq & Afghanistan, or any criticisms of US support for dictators & warlords worldwide. The author was specifically dealing with the degradation of CNN as reporters were continually attacked. Eventually, CNN management, and that of all the other “liberal media” decided that they had to play to the right in order to keep from being attacked.

Unless the left develops some public-relations counterbalance to the right’s (well-funded) “attack machine”, the mainstream media will continue to report only right-leaning propaganda – and those who just get their news from Internet ghettoes will continue to be only partially informed.

[…] headlines (see here, here, and here), which is notable since the Wall Street protests have received minimal media exposure. I presume that their choice of starting date (which they address here) is motivated by the video […]

Because there isn’t really a specific call to action. The 99% protesters aren’t speaking with a unified voice from city to city, or even tent to tent. They are against the 1% of the country controlling 30%+ of the wealth, but they don’t propose a specific solution to the problem.

The “hippies” in the 1960’s wanted the US out of Vietnam. A specific demand. The 99%’ers don’t have a specific demand, so they probably won’t be taken seriously.